PLOS ONE (originally PLoS ONE) is a peer-reviewedopen accessscientific journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. Operating under a pay-to-publish model, PLOS ONE publishes approximately 70% of submitted manuscripts. All submissions go through a pre-publication review by a member of the board of academic editors, who can elect to seek an opinion from an external reviewer. According to the journal, papers are not to be excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field. Although the number of submissions decreased from 2013 to 2014, PLOS ONE remains the world’s largest journal by number of papers published (about 30,000 a year, or 85 papers per day). PLOS ONE's impact factor is 3.057 (JCR) and its h-index is 181.[1]

History

Development

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded PLOS a $9 million grant in December 2002 and $1 million grant in May 2006 for its financial sustainability and launch of new free-access biomedical journals.[2][3] Later, PLOS ONE was launched in December 2006 as a beta version named PLoS ONE. It launched with Commenting and Note making functionality, and added the ability to rate articles in July 2007. In September 2007 the ability to leave "trackbacks" on articles was added.[4] In August 2008 it moved from a weekly publication schedule to a daily one, publishing articles as soon as they became ready.[5] In October 2008 PLoS ONE came out of "beta". Also in September 2009, as part of its Article-Level Metrics program, PLoS ONE made the full online usage data—e.g., HTMLpage views, PDF, XML downloads—for every published article publicly available. In mid-2012, as part of a rebranding of PLoS as PLOS, the journal changed its name to PLOS ONE.[6]

Output and turnaround

In 2007, it published just over 1,200 articles; and in 2008, it published almost 2,800 articles, making it the largest open access journal in the world.[7] In 2009, 4,406 articles were published, making PLOS ONE the third largest scientific journal in the world (by volume) and in 2010, 6,749 articles were published, making the journal the largest in the world (by volume).[8] In 2011, the journal published 13,798 articles,[9] meaning that approximately 1 in 60 of all articles indexed by PubMed as being published in 2011 were published by PLOS ONE,[10] In 2012, PLOS ONE published 23,468 papers.[11] In 2013, PLOS ONE published 31,500 papers.[12] 2014 saw the first year-over-year decline in published articles, to 30,040.[13] In 2015, PLOS ONE published 28,107 papers.[14]

At PLoS ONE, the median review time has grown from 37 days to 125 days over the first ten years of operation, according to Himmelstein's analysis, done for Nature. The median between acceptance and posting a paper on the site has decreased from 35 to 15 days over the same period. Both numbers for 2016 roughly correspond to the industry-wide averages for biology-related journals.[15][16]

Management

The founding managing editor was Chris Surridge.[17] He was succeeded by Peter Binfield in March 2008, who was publisher until May 2012.[18] Damian Pattinson then held the chief editorial position until December 2015.[19] Dr Joerg Heber was confirmed as Editor-In-Chief of PLOS ONE with effect from November 2016.[20]

Publication concept

PLOS ONE is built on several conceptually different ideas compared to traditional peer-reviewed scientific publishing in that it does not use the perceived importance of a paper as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. The idea is that, instead, PLOS ONE only verifies whether experiments and data analysis were conducted rigorously, and leaves it to the scientific community to ascertain importance, post publication, through debate and comment.[21]

“

Each submission will be assessed by a member of the PLOS ONE Editorial Board before publication. This pre-publication peer review will concentrate on technical rather than subjective concerns and may involve discussion with other members of the Editorial Board and/or the solicitation of formal reports from independent referees. If published, papers will be made available for community-based open peer review involving online annotation, discussion, and rating.[22]

”

According to Nature, the journal's aim is to "challenge academia's obsession with journal status and impact factors".[23] Being an online-only publication allows PLOS ONE to publish more papers than a print journal. In an effort to facilitate publication of research on topics outside, or between, traditional science categories, it does not restrict itself to a specific scientific area.[21]

Papers published in PLOS ONE can be of any length, contain full color throughout, and contain supplementary materials such as multimedia files. Reuse of articles is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License, version 2.5. In the first four years following launch, it made use of over 40,000 external peer reviewers.[24] The journal uses an international board of academic editors with over 6,000 academics handling submissions and publishes approximately 70% of all submissions, after review by, on average, 2.9 experts.[25] Registered readers can leave comments on articles on the website.[23]

As with all journals of the Public Library of Science, PLOS ONE is financed by charging authors a publication fee. The "author-pays" model allows PLOS journals to provide all articles to everybody for free (i.e., open access) immediately after publication. As of October 2015, PLOS ONE charged authors US$1,495[28] to publish an article. Depending on circumstances, it may waive or reduce the fee for authors who do not have sufficient funds.[29] This model has drawn criticism, however. In 2011 Richard Poynder posited that journals such as PLoS ONE that charge authors for publication rather than charging users for access may produce a conflict of interest that reduces peer review standards (accept more articles, earn more revenue).[30]Stevan Harnad instead argues for a "no fault" peer-review model, in which authors are charged for each round of peer review, regardless of the outcome, rather than for publication.[31] PLoS had been operating at a loss until 2009 but covered its operational costs for the first time in 2010,[32] largely due to the growth of PLOS ONE.

Community recognition and citation information

In September 2009, PLOS ONE received the Publishing Innovation Award of the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers.[36] The award is given in recognition of a "truly innovative approach to any aspect of publication as adjudged from originality and innovative qualities, together with utility, benefit to the community and long-term prospects". In January 2010, it was announced that PLOS ONE citations were to be analyzed by Journal Citation Reports,[37] and PLOS the journal received an impact factor of 4.411 in 2010. The impact factor has declined steadily each year since then, to 3.057 for 2015.[38]
In 2015, PLOS ONE ranked 25 on Google Scholar for all journals in terms of citations.[39]

Controversies

Sexist peer review

On April 29, 2015, Fiona Ingleby and Megan Head, postdoctoral fellows at the University of Sussex and Australian National University respectively, posted a rejection letter, which they said was sent to them by a peer reviewer for a journal they did not wish to name. The excerpt made negative comments about women's aptitude for science and advised Ingleby and Head to find male co-authors. Shortly afterward, the journal was reported to be PLOS ONE. By May 1, PLOS announced that it was severing ties with the reviewer responsible for the comments and asking the editor who relayed them to step down. PLOS ONE director Damian Pattinson also stated that the journal was considering moving away from the tradition of anonymous peer review.[41]

CreatorGate

On March 3, 2016, the editors of PLOS ONE initiated a reevaluation of an article about the functioning of the human hand[42] due to outrage among the journal's readership over a reference to "Creator" inside the paper.[43] The authors, who received grants from the Chinese National Basic Research Program and National Natural Science Foundation of China for this work, responded by saying "Creator" is a poorly-translated idiom (造化(者), literally "(that which) creates or transforms")[44] which means "nature" in the Chinese language. Despite the authors' protests, the article was retracted.[45] "Creator" is found in the paper in three sentences:

"The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way".

"Hand coordination should indicate the mystery of the Creator’s invention".

"In conclusion, our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years".

A less sympathetic explanation for the use of "Creator" was suggested to The Chronicle of Higher Education by Chinese-language experts who noted that the academic editor listed on the paper, Renzhi Han, previously worked at the Chinese Evangelical Church in Iowa City.[46]

Jonathan Eisen, chair of advisory board of a sister journal PLOS Biology and an advocate for open-access, defended PLOS ONE for prompt response to social media, which in his words "most journals pretend doesn’t even exist".[51] David Knutson issued a statement about the paper processing at PLOS ONE, which praised the importance of post-publication peer review and described their intention to offer open signed reviews in order to ensure accountability of the process.[52] From March 2 to 9, the research article received total 67 post-publication reader comments and 129 responses on PLOS ONE site, the first one from cell biologist turned science journalist Leonid Schneider who cited a Wikipedia article rather than scientific literature as an authority.[53][54] Signe Dean of SBS put #CreatorGate in perspective: it is not the most scandalous retraction in science, yet it shows how a social media outrage storm does expedite a retraction.[55]

The dissemination activity on social media within one week of publicity was: